At the start, it’s easy to get crazy motivated. Blogs like Pat Flynns’ SPI and tylercruz.com that show big 5 figure months just make you want to get started. It’s only after a couple months in you realize it’s not easy. In fact, it comes with it’s own set of challenges, often harder then full-time employment.

I started seeing success fairly early but I’ve still had periods of down time where I’ve been struck by doubt and fear and all those negative feelings you get when working for yourself. These times are a blessing though as this is where you get to learn about yourself and develop productive habits that make the good times even better.

As of late, I’ve come up with a set of rules, I enforce on myself every day to ensure I get the efficiency output I want.

Taking Tim Ferris’ advice, I’ve made a “Not to do” list for myself which has worked absolute wonders!

No Social Media/Socializing Till 5pm

No FaceBook/Whatsapp/Instagram or other social media activity during work hours, (morning – 5pm). Work is work and although your at home, mostly in front of the laptop and have the freedom to get up and do whatever you want, you need to implement discipline in this area and this is a great way to do it!

One Activity Per Work Phase

No working on other affiliate marketing related activities apart from the activity allocated for that specific time. (This one is great!). Basically, I only allow myself to work on a specific part of my business during a certain time. I don’t allow myself to work on anything else not matter what! For example,

6-8am: Affengineer Blog8-12pm: Datafeeds12-3pm: Teespring + FB

During these hours I can ONLY work on what I’ve allocated to it. This allows me to focus fully on the task at hand. I don’t know about you guys but I have issues in trying to focus on one particular thing lol. I’ll be working on my blog, then suddenly be struck with a teespring idea, quickly open up a tab and start working at it only to get to the end of the day and totally miss out on what I was initially working on, my blog.

Since I’ve implemented this rule, I’ve been able to systematically, get things done and give myself the peace of mind needed to actually enjoy myself during the process. Try it out, it works great!

Lemon Water or No Water

I don’t know what it is with Lemon Water but ever since I’ve been drinking it, I’ve felt so fresh and energetic that I can never have normal water again! Unless I’m really thirsty lol.

Healthy habits are the backbone of my success. From eating fruits and veggies only in the mornings to my lemon water drink bottles, keeping healthy allows you to focus better, work longer and generally be better prepared mentally to pull yourself through the work day.

Finish Important tasks by 10am

This is more of something I aim for and less of a rule. I’ve mentioned this before, somewhere in my much earlier posts but I’m a big morning person. I LOVE getting up early and getting things done when everyone’s asleep. Before I used to be really good at this and be able to put in a solid 4 hours of work before 10am!

Now days, after all these holidays and being jet-lagged and generally losing the habit, I’ve been trying to get back into it again. As I’m writing this, it’s 5am in Australia. For the last 3 days, I’ve been waking up at 3-4am and getting to work. My new plan is to work between 4-10am and get much of the important stuff done. I usually take a nap after 10am. Waking up from this nap and spending some time to look back gives me the biggest feeling of accomplishment. It takes the pressure off working the rest of the day and I don’t get as cranky when I get disturbed since I’ve already done all the important stuff!

I know it’s tough to wake up early but working when everyone is asleep is just too peaceful to pass by. I HIGHLY recommend this technique if you want to make the most of the freedom this industry brings.

Conclusion

If I need to implement any new rules, I often find that they get easier to keep as I start to build a streak of successful implementation. After the third day of sticking with it, it starts to become a habit and after the second week, it’s tuck to me.

If you need to get serious with yourself and making this work, try the above productivity tips. Keep things simple, implement them one week at a time and see what you learn about yourself. Part of working for yourself is being disciplined with your work habits, so it’s best to start early.

~ Mateen

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TOTAL INCOME

$2,006.59

Ouch, difficult month!

Although I started off great in May, I was mostly in struggle town and as I had little time to work on my business, this months result was not a surprise at all.

Big First Week

I made close to $2,000 in the first 4 days of May. This was all attributed to Teespring. The month before I was experimenting with my big Teespring campaigns. The ones that made me almost 90k profit in April. After learning how to use the reporting function of FaceBook when optimizing by conversions, I thought of an idea.

I’m a big believer in expanding campaigns as much as you can. Not to the extent that you’re hung up on one campaign for months on end but where there’s room to explore, you should. With this in mind I thought of testing every single country FaceBook allows for my most popular campaigns. Till this point I had only tested a handful of countries. This time I decided to just bunch countries by alphabet and see if my shirts sell. After testing about 150-200 countries I found a cool new set of countries where my shirts sold REALLY well!

After shortlisting these, I made a new set of campaigns aimed at JUST these countries and bam, $500-$1,000 profit days again.

The best part about this is, I now have the knowledge on which countries buy western goods. I have a neat list of converting countries so in the future if I find something that works well in the U.S, I can immediately test out 20 or so different countries that should show some results.

Anyway, the fun only lasted 4 days, then I hit struggle town..

Teespring Fail after Fail

i don’t know what happened but the next 10-20 designs I made for teespring flopped BAD. Designs that I thought would definitely sell, didn’t. I would make batches of 5-10 designs and put them all out there, check in after a day and be stunned that none sold!

When this happens time and time again to an affiliate marketer, regardless of the success you’ve had in the past, you start doubting yourself again. Thoughts like, “Oh, I think the market is saturated” or, “I must have just gotten lucky in the past”, start coming in to play and this can be dangerous to your business. Your mindset in this whole journey is probably THE most important element needed to succeed. Often, when I’ve truly believed in myself, I’ve succeeded. When thoughts like these come to the mind, this is where a true affiliate marketer will push through. People at this point will give up and move on. What does this mean? It means a lot less competition!

When people are disheartened about something and are leaving the space, that’s the perfect opportunity to jump in. It might be harder to get things working again but that’s the part where your supposed to get creative. At this point, I’m finding it difficult to get things working with Teespring. Just to challenge myself and prove to myself to never go by what people say, I’ve set a self challenge to find 100 more profitable Teespring campaigns by the end of this year.

Let’s see how I go.

Holiday!

Probably the biggest reason for my poor performance this month. From the 17th to the 29th of May I was on holiday. I visited Singapore and India with a close friend of mine and we had an awesome time! It couldn’t have come at a better time as I was feeling a little over worked.

Taking a break is healthy for your business. Well for me at least. My grandparents live in India and it’s great to visit them whenever I get the opportunity. They’re used to seeing me once in a blue moon, (once in 3-4 years), and they were surprised to see me again after 6 months from my last visit.

I was only able to do this because of my affiliate marketing success. It makes me realize how much I want this to continue to work as it lets me do things that are more important then money. Just being able to see family and spend time with them, seeing them smile is a blessing and gives me motivation to pursue a healthy career in this industry.

This year alone, I’ve visited a good 4-5 different countries. I can EASILY work from any one of them and am definitely considering it when things stabilize a little.

Realized how Temporary Teespring Campaigns Are

Last time I was on holiday I made about 1-2k doing very little work. I’d check into my PPV & PPC campaigns and make sure everything was going ok. I had some healthy campaigns back then that had been giving me profits for months. This time however, they were giving me negative days. On top of that, most of my focus for the last two months were teespring and FaceBook. One thing I realized and wrote about before was how short lived these campaigns were. They lasted about a week tops and then boom, little to no sales!

Teespring via FB is great but it can really be a full-time job sometimes and the passive lifestyle that’s so enticing in this industry no longer exists. This month made that very clear to me hence the reason I’ve made teespring a side thing. I’ll give it my full focus if I hit on a big idea again but for now, I’ll try 5-10 designs a week tops.

Introduction to Datafeed sites

I’ve mentioned these before I’m sure but it was only in May that I actually got around to making my first site.

The concept of datafeed sites are quite interesting. It was one of the many topics David covered in his master classes on AffPlaybook. he had around 40 of these netting him between $1-$100 a day. Even if we were to take the low end of this as an average, ($25/day), that’s $1k a day in organic income!

May made it clear that I NEED to start building some organic assets so in the second week of May I made my first datafeed site! (See below).

The plan is to make 100s of these and hope on some of the 1000’s of product pages to start ranking and start bringing in converting traffic.

Datafeeds are excel spreadsheets that merchants produce for the products available on their stores. These spreadsheets include important information on every single product and can be used to build websites like the above. I use datafeedr to build sites like this and I’m paying about $97 per month for the unlimited plan. Datafeedr makes it simple to build sites like these. You can pump them out per hour once you get the process right!

Organic Income Growing

I’ve always wanted to grow this side of my business. There’s an insecure feeling that always surfaces time and time again when all I have are paid advertising campagins bringing me money. You never know when your current gold mine will run out and when you’ll have to frantically search for the next converting offer.

Over the last couple of weeks though I’ve been seeing a healthy increase in the income this site brings me. I don’t really push anything on this site, just refer to some tools and services that have genuinely helped me along the way.

This month I was pretty close to $500. That’s pretty cool since it should only grow from here. I’d love to get it up to 5-10k by the end of this year. That would be around 100k per year just from this blog which would be mostly passive!

Blogs are also pretty helpful in launching new products, sites and services. I’d love to build something for our affiliate community that’s more then this blog. I’m still thinking what that would be though. Maybe a massive site with just tutorials and guides? I don’t know, we’ll see!

Next month, if this trend continues with my blog earnings, I might add it in my monthly reports, similar to what Pat flynn does over at SPI. I might even create some pie charts to show the spread of income. Let me know what you guys think.

Conclusion

There wasn’t much to report on this month except for the little teespring success I had at the start and my first datafeed sites. Much of my time this month was spent holidaying. We recently had a member on AffPlaybook who made 7.2k within his first month on teespring! This shows that teespring is still alive and well, it’s just harder to get things working due to that many people working it.

That’s it for this month, good luck for June guys!

~ Mateen

Want to get Serious with Internet Marketing? Join us on Aff Playbook Below!